


Red, Purple, Blue

by JustJasper



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Angst, Blood Magic, Dreams, F/F, F/M, Ficlet Collection, One-Sided Attraction, Recovery, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-21
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-31 12:38:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3978361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustJasper/pseuds/JustJasper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ficlets concerning a Surana, a Hawke and a Cadash.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. agelast

**Author's Note:**

> This collection is for one of my worldstates.
> 
> Warden = [Saelki Surana](http://justjasper.tumblr.com/tagged/saelki_surana)  
> Champion = [Vena Hawke](http://justjasper.tumblr.com/tagged/vena_hawke)  
> Inquisitor = [Zirconia Cadash](http://justjasper.tumblr.com/tagged/zirconia_cadash)
> 
> Others may also show up, but in this 'verse they are non-main characters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Agelast - A person who never laughs.
> 
> Reblog on tumblr: [here](http://justjasper.tumblr.com/post/118562617880/agelast).

She would be killed in his homeland. Adaar, Bas, Saarebas, she would be executed as soon as she stepped into Par Vollen. He had spent many months expected that he’d have to do it himself, that the magic the elf called Surana wielded so brazenly would overflow her and he’d have to reach out and snap her neck. Instead, he lets her heal a deep puncture wound on his thigh with a green-glowing hand, and she tells him she’s sorry for not blocking the attacker, even though they both know she couldn’t have done it in time. One of those curious falsehoods humans and elves alike maintain in an attempt to make each other feel better. It works.

She is curious, and asks too many questions. Even when he gives nothing, she asks, and he does not think she has had any training in interrogation. She is extremely bad at it, in fact, even if the other companions she has gathered seem eager to give up all they can to her, even the shape-shifting Bas-Saarebas. Yet, as terrible as she would be extracting information as an interrogator in any official capacity, he relents. He tries not to think about it too much, that there is something genuine about her questions, and something clever about the things she prioritises to ask him. He tells her he likes cakes, and he feels happy that this knowledge makes her happy.

She says things that the others find humorous, but they do not translate. Qunlat is a language of multiple meanings and wordplay, it is clever and funny, but he only knows her tongue enough to get by, not the subtly of it. It is unexpected, when he begins to feel disappointed by this. Her dark eyes go so narrow when she laughs, that at first it had felt dangerous. The danger changes over time, that when she laughs he feels warmth, because he realises that she has never laughed at anything he has said, even though the others do. They mock him, and although he does not care, that she does not join them begins to matter. The first time he makes her laugh it is deliberate, the use of a wrong word that gives the sentence dual meaning, and she laughs brightly, showing teeth, and he could almost join her in it.


	2. agelast ii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Agelast - A person who never laughs
> 
> reblog on tumblr: [here](http://justjasper.tumblr.com/post/119476408930/agelast)

Surana asks him to wait, and he does. She has earned that of him, and much more besides. She tells him she needs stories for the trip they intend to make, even if he knows what keeps her is a mixture of duty and love for the venak hol who insists he is  _soft_ .

Eventually, the trip to where he’ll leave for Seheron takes them through Ferelden, the Free Marches, Rivain and Antiva, and takes many months. They are alone for much of it, though people have a habit of turning up and tagging along for a time. Sten finds it less tiresome than he had once, and she does him the courtesy of not pointing this out like the Bard would. 

She is a mage who stopped a Blight, she is honourable, and he trusts his life to her. The thing that almost brings him to his knees is realising that she trusts her own to him in turn. Even knowing that she can go no further than the shores of Antiva with him, knowing that every morning he has to check she is still herself and that if he finds a demon is inside her he will snap her neck, knowing in another place he would cut her down without a second thought, she still trust him. It’s so very  _qunari_ of her, he could almost laugh.

At the end Sten continues north by sea as Surana goes west, and she is kadan, so a part of him goes with her.


	3. quidnunc

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quidnunc - One who always has to know what is going on

It’s hard not to know what the woman Leliana loves is doing, or even where she is. She knows more about goings on in Par Vollen, thanks to Iron Bull’s Ben-Hasrath connections, than she does of the currently situation concerning the woman who wore flowers in her hair when they were married under the great boughs of an ancient tree.

She knows the names of every one of Cullen’s immediate relatives and their children, she knows the ins and outs of the Montilyet family like the back of her hand, knows of every scandal in the Penteghast line going back two hundred years. She has to know this to be the best asset she can be for the Inquisition.

But she also knows the exact shade of blue that is lady Vivienne’s favourite, how Blackwall takes his tea on the rare occasion he drinks it, and she knows far more about Iron Bull and Dorian’s business than either of them would be comfortable with her knowing. Yet there are things about the love of her life that she still doesn’t know, and doesn’t know if what she knew is still correct. Does she still hate soft soled shoes, or has she adapted? Does the scar climbing her thigh from the battle against the Archdemon cause her problems? Does she still drink elfroot tea, or has she found something else? Does she dream about her?

She holds onto the belief - no, the certainty that she will know these things, soon. In the meantime she learns all she can about everything that matters, crafts knowledge into weapons and arms their cause with them.


	4. pilgrim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sunspeared: Zirconia Cadash (I am Fond), with Jak as a companion?

“What is it with qunari and package deals?” she says, much to the bemusement of the Valo-Kas solider in the keep at Skyhold.

“What?” Adaar asks, hand nervously twisting on the hilt of her sword.

“The last qunari I hired threw a whole company into the mix. Only the one tal-vashoth though. Apparently there’s a whole bunch of you, a whole kith I’ve now got contact with.”

Adaar frowns. She’s tall and build solid, Cadash can see as much, with curling horns tipped in metal, and freckles over her nose. She’s a  _baby_.

“How long have you been with the Valo-Kas?”

“Three years,” she says, though it’s clear it wasn’t the question she was expecting.

“Does Kaariss still write sodding awful poems?”

Adaar’s frown on such a young face is sort of hilarious. Cadash doesn’t laugh, though she does smile in what she hopes is a charming sort of way.

“The Carta and the Valo-Kas have worked together. You think Shokrakar would have let you come on this pilgrimage if she didn’t have some clue what was going on?”

Now she’s embarrassed the poor woman, and that’s not her style, so she tries smiling again. Adaar is still clutching the hilt of her sword.

“I guess you were hoping for someone a little more… Chantry? Herald-y?”

“No,” Adaar says quickly. “I mean, I knew you were a dwarf, but I can be Andrastian, then I figured…”

“Sorry. Can’t pretend I really believe that I’m sent by the Maker. Though at this point it doesn’t really matter what I think.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t let you come all this way to turn you away at the gates,” Cadash says. “Herald or not, if you want to stay and fight for the Inquisition, I’d be happy to have you. Shokrakar assures me I’m getting her best frontline fighter. You want to show me what you can do?”

“Yes, Herald,” Adaar says, and though she doesn’t let go of her sword, her grip is sure now, steady. “Inquisitor, I mean.”

“Either’s fine. Cadash is better,” she says, beckoning Adaar to follow. “Let’s go find some of Cullen’s men for you to wail on, he keeps telling me they need all the practice they can get.”


	5. first blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first time Surana does blood magic, it's clumsy and desperate.

They're going to die. Surana knows it, as she feels the barrier she's sustaining around them falter. There are dozens of darkspawn bearing down on them, and it takes everything she has to keep warping the barrier around Alistair and Oghren as they parry and swung and cut down what they can. Leliana is fresh out of arrows, and has taken her daggers to the darkspawn that target Surana, and she must know the only thing standing between them and a hail of arrows is the barrier.

Fuck the Deep Roads. They're going to _die_.

She gestures violently at her last discarded lyrium vial on the ground nearby, and Leliana dashes for it without question. Surana snatches it from her and crushes the glass in her gloved hand, keeping the biggest shard while the rest fall away. It's a stupid idea, but she licks a broad stripe up what was the inside of the vial, cuts the edge of her tongue, but it's enough—just—to give her the power to set fire to one of the darkspawn, its flesh burning and the flames catching onto others nearby.

“Move!”

They manage to break through the darkspawn ranks and dash along the tunnel, Alistair leading the charge even on an ankle that shouldn't really support his weight in the state it is. They're close, so close to base camp, near enough that the others might hear their plight; what she wouldn't give for Sten and Shale to come thundering into their midst and crush the darkspawn underneath them, Wynn and Morrigan to throw up barriers, Zevran and the damn dog to go for throats.

Of course, because it's the Deep Roads and nothing has gone right in the fucking Deep Roads, they run into another wall of darkspawn blocking their way.

“We're dead,” Oghren grunts as Surana puts everything she has into a barrier around them that is only going to delay the inevitable. She's out, she has nothing left in her, running on that last taste of lyrium. The effort of holding the barrier feels like it's mining her very bones for power, she is breathless with it. She can taste blood and—

There is only one way out. It might not work. It might be better if it doesn't.

She turns her face to Leliana.

“I'm sorry.”

“My love,” Leliana chokes out, eye wide with terror.

What could she be thinking? Not this. Not Surana sliding her hand down her staff so she can turn the blade against her own wrist, cuts through her glove and her skin in one sharp slice.

Leliana shrieks. “No!”

It has never felt like this to bleed before, but then she never had this kind of intent. The blood runs wet and warm from the wound, and she can feel the power of it, the way the Fade twists around her. Distantly, she remembers that she has been taught to fear this her entire life.

She throws her arm out, and he blood that flies from her wrist in droplets forms into a shimmer red barrier to replace the fading blue.

She can hear Alistair over the clanging of metal and the screeching darkspawn. “What're you doing?!”

“Saving your life!”

It's like drowning without dying. Her mana regenerates too fast for her to use it up on fire and ice and blood that creeps over the darkspawn and burrows into them, tearing them apart from the inside out. Her veins are fat with it, like they could burst within her, so she pushes it forward and out.

It might kill her. She could just as easily live forever with the throb of blood and magic in her ears.

The darkspawn blood is blighted like her own, and she uses that to rip their flesh away from their bones, to shrivel their hearts and their eyes, to hollow them out so Oghren and Alistair and Leliana can cut through them like dried flowers.

Silence falls when all of the darkspawn are dead.

“You're bleeding,” Leliana cries, snatching up her wrist.

She could laugh; Surana has never seen so much of her own blood before. Distantly she thinks Oghren _does_ laugh, too high and strained. Maybe he's thinking the same. There is so much blood.

“Maker have mercy,” Alistair says, the last thing she hears as she slides into unconsciousness.


	6. relief

The night she loses the arm, Cadash doesn’t dream.

She wakes groggy, with shooting pain where her arm no longer exists, from an long-unfamiliar dreamless sleep.

“Love,” Josephine says as she crowds the side of the bed, still dressed, alert and tired. She hasn’t slept. “Are you alright?”

“Bull already made that joke,” she says, clutching the stump of her arm and squeezing over the bandage as she catalogues her surroundings; over-large bed, excessive furniture, a lanky boy curled up in a plush armchair. Orlais, Winter Palace. After.

“What?”

“Cole’s still here.”

He tips his head up, eyes glassy in the firelight. Josephine smooths her fingers over Cadash’s bandages.

“Yes. I let him stay.”

“The mark held the path, and now it’s lost,” Cole says. “Quiet, dark, empty now.”

“My love,” Josephine says, concern pressed into the tired set of her face. 

“I didn’t dream.” 

It’s all she needs to say; Josephine intimately knows of her dreaming, experienced her intrigue and fascination, her frustration and her fear as she gained passage into the dream Fade she should never have had. She counted the days Cadash stayed awake to avoid them, and the nights when she crashed and couldn’t avoid them any longer.

“The medicines, perhaps,” Josephine says gently, cautiously. “Perhaps they put you out, and you’ll dream again.”

“I don’t think I will.”

She lifts her remaining hand to her eyes as they sting suddenly with tears, shudders a breath out to try and stay them. She needs it to be true.

“They wanted to look, to follow,” Cole says, “but you were too bright to hurt. Now they’re sad, and you won’t come back.”

“They’re gone,” Cadash says, pulls a breath into her lungs and pushes it out slowly, until it feels safe to look at Josephine without crumbling. “They’re really gone.”

An easy calm comes over her, even with the pain in her arm now a persistent throb, and a hilariously improbable thought: perhaps now she’ll get some peace and quiet, at least in her own head.


End file.
